Why is Twitter Perfect for Learning Spanish?

Social media is one of the most valuable language learning tools to use today. It is free to use and let’s face it we all spend a good while on various social media platforms every single day! Why not combine this with language learning and use some of that time to work on improving the language you are learning?

Why Use Twitter to Learn Spanish?

• It is easy to use whenever you have a few spare minutes during the day.
• You can use Twitter on any device including your smart phone, tablet or laptop.
• It is perhaps the best social media app for learning Spanish.
• You don’t have to be friends with someone to access their comments or posts. It is open to the world.
• You can read tweets from Spanish celebrities, politicians, sports stars, actors, companies as well as anybody you know – friends and family.
• You can tweet someone directly or mention them in a tweet.
• It’s constantly updated so you get the latest information and up-to-date language.
• Topics are organised by hashtags so you can easily find what you want to read about or find out about.
• Tweets are short, up to 280 characters so you get the key information quickly and you don’t need to spend ages translating words.
• You don’t need lots of followers to use Twitter effectively. You can still follow whoever you want to.

How to Use Twitter to Learn Spanish

Goal Setting

Using Twitter to hold yourself accountable is a great way to make sure you stick to your goals and achieve them. By setting yourself short term goals such as, writing a short tweet every day in Spanish, you will feel obliged to do this as you will have told all of your followers that this is what you do.

Document your learning

By using Twitter to document your learning you will easily keep track of what you have learnt and how far you have progressed. By looking back at your first ever tweets you will realise just how far you have come and be less likely to give up as you won’t want to waste all of that hard work and let all of that study time go to waste.

So every time you learn a new word, write a tweet using that word in an example sentence or post a labelled picture of the item or related to the verb.

6) Interact with native speakers

As well as following native Spanish speakers you can also connect with them and message them or even start a language exchange if they are also learning English.

Easy Tricks to Use Twitter Effectively

1) Use the Twitter search bar

Check your vocabulary is up-to-date: If you have just come across a word in a novel you are reading or an old phrase book and you want to check that it is still used today, just type it in the search bar at the top of Twitter and you will see the tweets with the word mentioned and how recent or long ago they were.
This is good because you don’t want to waste time and brain cells on memorising words that are no longer used in real life.

2) Follow good Spanish tweeters

The wider range of people you follow, the better for your overall grasp of the language, vocabulary and grammar.
To find the most popular twitter profiles in Spain according to industry use Social Bakers:

News:
Some good Spanish news tweeters to follow are:

@CNNEE: Spanish CNN – full of up-to-date news stories
@bbcmundo: BBC Mundo news website
@el_pais: El País – Spain’s national newspaper
@elmundoes: El Mundo newspaper

Spanish Language Learning tweeters that are good to follow include:

@EduLearnSpanish
@Spanishpod101
@spanishlanguage
@learnspanish
@SpanishDict

3) Use the hashtag to your advantage

Use hashtags to find the topic you want to know about and you will find tweets using that word for whatever reason.
When you send a tweet remember to add in a hashtag to a key word so that other people can find your tweet on that topic. This way you can stay better connected and share more relevant resources.

4) Use Advance Search feature

By using the advance search option you can easily research new words and phrases you have come across to see examples of how they are used by typing it in the “This exact phrase” box.

You can filter your tweets so that you will only see tweets in your feed that are in Spanish by choosing “Spanish” for the “Written in” box.

In summary

As you can see there are lots of ways you can maximise your use of Twitter to improve your Spanish. The more Spanish twitter accounts you follow, the better for your Spanish. The best way to make sure you are making the most of your Twitter account for learning Spanish is to mix up your acquisition of the language – such as by reading other people’s tweets, with your use of Spanish – writing your own tweets in Spanish and interacting with other Spanish twitter accounts. This way you are building your vocabulary as well as putting it into practice.

If you would like to read about how to use instagram to learn Spanish check out this blog post: “How to Learn Spanish with Instagram – Top Tip!”